Tech titans wish we wouldn’t quote them on this baloney

Matthew Szulik, CEO of open-source software company Red Hat, wants to show me his company’s new video.

It rolls through evangelical sequences about how the underdog open-source movement is going to prove wrong its doubters. To bolster this point, the video flashes quotes by people through history who had experienced some sort of brain flatulence when assessing a technology newcomer.

Among the quotes is this widely circulated comment attributed to Thomas Watson, builder of IBM, in 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”